An ex-Yahoo here, using a throwaway account.

Yahoo's biggest problem is the creamy middle layer of managers. They are usually lifers (as in, been at Yahoo for a decade), or fresh MBAs with a Stanford degree who think that just because they sat through Management-101, they know how products should be designed.

This middle layer is like a Turkish harem. They're busy backstabbing each other, politicking and fucking things up. BUT NO ONE HOLDS THEM ACCOUNTABLE! Some dick will screw up a project, and then when the team gets laid off, happily move to another one to fuck that up too. Too often I've seen engineers just get disgusted and leave; or they'll go into a depressive "I don't care" mode. Passive-aggressive behavior is the norm.

Blake, when he joined, said that "we say 'no' to nothing, and 'no' to everything". What he meant was: in a meeting, the manager will say 'yes' to everything; but the moment he steps outside, he'll think "I'm not gonna do that!".

Innovation is also hampered by these middle morons. Someone tries to do something innovative, and a middle cockroach will crawl out, whining that his 'team' is working on it, and they'll have something ready in (some future quarter). So you're told to back off. Then you wait. In the meantime, that middle manager will use this opportunity to ask for more reqs and expand his little fiefdom. Time will pass, and nothing will get done. And you'll be waiting, agonizing, watching competitors eat Yahoo's lunch as this middle manager fucks around.

And then there will be cycles of outsourcing to Bangalore and Beijing. Some middle beancounter decided that 3 engineers in India can be hired for 1 engineer in the US. (Never mind the quality of people; it's just the 3:1 ratio that matters). So now they're busy outsourcing to Bangalore. Even critical support tasks are outsourced to Bangalore. So what used to take a couple of back-and-forth emails and get fixed in an hour, now takes 3-4 days.

The list of Yahoo's problems are long; and C-level people are not high on that list. "Vision" is also not a problem for Yahoo, if they'd just let the engineers just do their fucking jobs!

Carol's biggest mistake was pissing Jack Ma off and losing Alipay. A person at that level should never, ever, make such a blunder; and she had to go.

If you don't understand git, then don't mess around with 'rebase', 'push -f', or any other command that tries to edit history. These commands assume that you have a strong mental model of how git works, and this is how the author of the article got into trouble.

It's possible to build a very successful git workflow using only the following commands:

    git clone git:...
    git add path/to/new_file
    git commit -a
    git pull
    git push

(Yes, commit before pulling, rather than vice versa.)

If you want to use branches, you need to add:

    # Showing branches.
    git branch -a
    gitk --all

    # Checking out branches.
    git checkout some_branch

    # Creating and pushing a new branch.
    git checkout -b new_branch_name
    git push -u origin new_branch_name

    # Checking out an existing branch.    
    git checkout -b some_branch origin/some_branch

    # Merging a branch into your current branch.
    git pull origin some_branch

This workflow is extremely safe. At worst, you might need to resolve a merge conflict.

But if you start digging around under the hood, and you start editing your commit history, you'd better be prepared to understand what you're trying to do.

Amazing. We are surely looking at the future of porn.

"What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that’s not at all what is happening in Bitcoin."

Spot friggin' on, Mr. Krugman. Bitcoin's supply limiting design has added a psychological dimension that encourages collecting. Perhaps when Bitcoin reaches supply maturity the value will stabilize but for now its value just too unstable to be used as a currency.